


Reciprocal Motion

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dancing, Embarrassment, Established Relationship, Finn inna dress, M/M, Shyness, Tenderness, Undercover Missions, learning, the Costume Department
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 17:25:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18833290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Finn's always found plenty of ways to enjoy himself--and Poe--besides dancing. Until they take the undercover mission on Coruscant.





	Reciprocal Motion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/gifts).



> Happy belated birthday and wishes for a good year to the very dear Gloss, whose writing and being shine, and who inspires, challenges, boosts and sustains me as a writer and a person.
> 
> I hope I do the same for you, buddy, at least sometimes. I admire you and love you very much.

It wasn't a big deal.

There were lots of things he _could_ do, did do, and well.

There were _lots_ of things (Finn always heard this in Poe's voice, with the vocal equivalent of an eyebrow waggle) they did together. And it's not like he hadn't tried, usually at Poe's invitation, sometimes just because he could tell it would make him happy.

But whenever the music picked up a thumping beat, stuttering out into loop, dip and swirl, and when whoever was around started to drape themselves over it, let it scoop them up, fit their bodies in between its sounds, Finn called it a night. Found a place to sit or a wall to lean against, nursed a drink if it was that kind of party, watched everybody else be beautiful. If Poe was there, watched him move like he was born to do just this, fluidly or sharply or bouncily depending on what the music was doing, lifting and dropping among the people around him.

It was the other people who threw Finn off. He could move according to the beat or he could move with an awareness of the other dancers, but he couldn't do both.

“You used to move in formation,” Poe pointed out when Finn told him this.

“Yeah, but that was something you did by yourself.”

“It was not, I've seen the holos.”

“I mean, everybody was just doing what they were supposed to do. It wasn't like you had to watch out for what the guy next to you was doing and change what you were doing because of her. Also we didn't have to do things on purpose _and_ relax at the same time.”

Finn was, at that moment, pretty damn relaxed, as he tended to be after an orgasm and some lazy making out, and with the infrequent gift of Poe still in his arms. They were under the blankets and everything. He didn't even really care that Poe was getting on his case. Who needed dancing or even peace and quiet when he had this, Poe's face sort of smushed on Finn's shoulder, his arm across Finn's chest, his voice a post-sex mumble, his breath constant, his presence...present? Yes.

Mostly dancing was a down-time thing, a social cohesion thing, and it came with plenty of other ways to cohere. There was always someone sitting out with an injury or too much to drink; he could keep them company or get them water. He could stomp in rhythm, exhorting the dancers to greater flights, or give Poe a glimpse of thumbs-up between the crowd's flashing limbs and flickering hips. He could feel part of things and have a perfectly good time. It wasn't a _necessity._

Until they got the assignment on Coruscant.

“The Library wants us to meet her at a rooftop party in Tiptree Canyon,” Poe told him, covered by the noise of the skimmer. “'I've been to those parties. We're gonna need to blend in.” His glee was detectable through the engine's hum. Of the twenty-six hours between briefing and departure, Poe had spent three of them pawing and sifting through the locker he called the Costume Department, choosing _absolutely essential_ garments for them both to wear. (“We're not the same size,” Finn had pointed out when Poe got back to their bunk with a gauzy, glittery, feathery, scaly armful.

“Think I've had my hands on your ass enough to know what'll fit you.”)

The freelance operative called the Library had earned her name through her eidetic memory, and the meetup was an information drop: Poe's earring, glinting when he craned toward Finn for a kiss, held a tiny and powerful unidirectional microphone (“ _micro_ phone, get it?”) wired subcutaneously to the datachip implanted in the hollow of his shoulder. Whispering on the dance floor was, Finn had to admit, a great way to pass on intel undisturbed and undetected; the implants were Oodgeroo biotech, unlikely to show up on a scan the way an ordinary data vehicle would. “Should you be seen kissing me if you're supposed to be trying to pick her up?” he murmured to the earring.

Poe responded to this by waiting for the skimmer to veer and then overtly, obviously, grinding his ass into Finn's groin. “I'm trying to pick _everyone_ up.”

“That explains why you're dancing,” Finn said. “It doesn't explain why I have to be dancing.”

“Everyone dances at these.” It took Finn a second to register that the glee was utterly gone from Poe's voice, and so was the nudgey tone that he sometimes used after a party back at base. He was—Finn realized—unhappy that Finn had to do something he didn't like to do. “We can't stand out too much, and we need you nearby in case something goes wrong. You can probably sit out a few, but you should be out on the floor. I'm--”

Finn gathered Poe close and kissed him hard so that he wouldn't have to say he was sorry.

The veripax-skin sheath dress fit perfectly. The pencil Poe had used to outline Finn's lips felt greasy and strange, hovering on the surface of him. He felt his heart beating there, how he'd held his breath while Poe leaned in frowning, the light tracing pressure of his concentration, getting the line just right. Then Poe had left for the place a few levels down where he was renting a room, a different room. Their cover meant that they would arrive separately, didn't know each other anywhere near well enough for one to put the other's makeup on.

Finn's bare arms pressed against strangers on the horizontal transport. Strangers in the vertical lift eyed him up and down. In the gondola down into Tiptree Canyon, one of its pulleys built into a foundation and the other hitched to a tall glimmering spire, strangers made room for him, then brushed against him, lightly furred or clammy, bristling or running hot.

Next to the landing pad, someone had trained vines and temperate orchids over a security gate. Finn stretched and turned as directed, thinking about the ceramic knife tucked into his high boot, the speed and efficiency with which he'd bring it into his hand if he had to, the grace that belonged to him.

The party was lively but not packed, the rooftop mosses spongy underfoot. Great, Finn thought, like dancing wasn't hard enough. As if the Force had a mean sense of humor, a tall Lluvian drifted wide of the crowd and reached out an appendage, undulating their midsection in a clear invitation. Finn swallowed hard and extended his hand.

He tried. Their limbs were so fluid; he felt rigid, encased in a cast from waist to knees. The music's patterns seemed to elude him, and his thighs chafed inside the tight skirt. The two of them might as well have been dancing on different planets, and when the song ended, Finn didn't need to be familiar with Lluvian body language to interpret their cool departure.

There was a bar in the corner of the rooftop that faced the canyon wall, with its terraced chains of water towers lit up blue and vertical forests lit up green. Finn went there and pretended to look at the drinks on offer, little jeweled holos making their own chain of lights in the air. He knew that this could only buy him a little time, that he'd need to go back to the dance floor and blend in, somehow.

A stirring at his side, and Poe was there, letting a kind of tarnished, generic brightening— _What are you drinking, stranger?_ without saying it—polish up into something marginally warmer and clearer, a recognition. “Good to see you again!” he was saying.

“Same to you,” Finn said, both telling the truth and falling into line. “Didn't know you were still in town.”

Poe was well launched into his cover: a mid-life crisis, a nascent career in holo-art, the search for commissions and backers that gave him a reason to be at this party. Finn, who already knew the story because he'd helped develop it, wasn't listening so much as looking. When Poe had left Finn's room, he'd still been in his ordinary clothes; now he was in silvery mesh leggings and a feathered top that ended at the bottom of his ribs. His navel with its wreath of dark hair seemed to beckon Finn's tracing finger. “Wanna take a spin?” he was saying.

 _Not really,_ Finn thought. “I'm not much of a dancer,” he said out loud. That shouldn't cause any trouble; anyone who'd been watching him with the Lluvian already knew that.

“Don't worry about it,” Poe said, the eyebrow waggle in his voice and also his actual eyebrows, both raised slightly to let any attentive bystanders know what kind of guy he was. “I dance well enough for two.” He took Finn's hand, drawing him outward as the music changed, finding a clear tract of rooftop moss. Finn muttered, “I feel like my hips are frozen.”

“Don't worry about your hips either.” Now Poe was using his ordinary voice, pitched just for the two of them. A light pressure, Poe's fingertips, between Finn's shoulder blades. “Feel my hand, just follow my hand, okay?” A shift in the pressure now, from side to side, so that Finn wanted to sway into it.

The hand on Finn's spine moved lower, rustling across the scales, crossing the scar underneath, and Poe's other hand pressed at Finn's hip, nudging there. Finn nudged back, let his feet follow. “That's it,” Poe said, still low, “that one too, move with me.”

“I'm dancing.”

“You're dancing,” Poe agreed, his smile audible. “We're dancing. I don't know why we didn't do it like this before.”

“Yeah, why didn't we?” They weren't even moving very much, but Finn felt poised and loose within that range of motion, sweat starting to prickle under Poe's hand—resting just above Finn's ass now, transmitting their rhythm.

“Didn't think of it,” Poe admitted. “I guess I just think of dancing as the kind of thing you have to find your own way into.”

Finn let himself drift a little closer, found he could do it without losing his balance, bent to Poe's ear. “You're my way in,” he said. “And my way out.”

“That's gonna be on the record.” The ear Finn was breathing into was the one with the earring in it.

“Good, I want it on the record. And you know what else I want—”

“Just don't say anything you don't want Beeb to transcribe.” The little droid had called dibs on the task before they left for Coruscant, claiming that his processor-to-readout ratio was the best on base. The ratio was fine, but it was mostly that he felt left out. They'd agreed to humor him.

“I love you,” Finn said, imagining the words and their meaning singing down the circuitry under Poe's skin, collecting, being stored there.

As the song wound up for a final reprise, as dancing just kept getting easier, other things started being noticeable again: someone's high nasal laugh ringing out, an increase in the density of the crowd... and a stocky woman with a rolling walk, gray hair in a high woven tower and a dusk-ruby labret, who Finn recognized from the briefing. “The Library's by the purple thing,” he murmured to Poe.

“The orchid trellis?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks,” Poe said, loud again for the other dancers. Into the silence after the final breakdown, Finn said, “Maybe I'll see you again later,” and it rang unexpectedly loud. But that was all to the good, as Poe let a noncommittal smile slide across his face and away, strolling through the crowd toward the archway decked with purple flowers, or maybe white flowers lit purple. Time for him to schmooze a few more potential “clients” on the way to the Library, for him to ask her for a dance and then another, for Finn to keep lookout while acting sulky and then resigned and then, at the end of the night, let Poe pick him up again as sloppy seconds when the Library staged a rejection. Time then to ride back to Finn's slightly nicer room, ditch the mic in the lift, push Poe down on the bed and peel away whatever aspects of the night they wanted to leave behind, keep what they wanted to keep.

For now, a new song's starting up, and the ghosts of Poe's fingertips are nudging at Finn's spine, movement spreading out from there to his hips and shoulders, shifting his feet under him, carrying him onward.

 


End file.
